The Widow Page 7

  He looked aghast. “They gave you away?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s actually very common.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” he admitted. “Here, every child is so precious.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe they couldn’t afford me. Maybe they wanted a boy. Who knows?” I sighed. The look on his face told me that the simple explanation wasn’t going to cut it. “A lot of people abandon their babies just to give them a better chance at a good life,” I told him. “Earth is expensive. Food, education, health care. Most people barely get by. But the foundling houses are state run and funded. They educate the children based on their proficiencies and intelligence, not based on how much money their parents have, so a lot of people view it as giving their children an even playing field.”

  “And does it?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Say you want to be a doctor,” I told him. “You might not be that great at science, but you have the desire and even if you have to work harder, you’re willing to put forth the effort.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, the foundling system takes that option away. Nobody ever asks what you want to do. They tell you what you’re going to study and you study it. Also, there’s a certain degree of corruption. Foundlings aren’t just sent out into the world to make their way when their education is over. They’re put under a mandatory contract to offset the cost of educating them. When you’re done with school, you take a government assigned job for a set number of years, and they take a portion of your pay.”

  “That sounds fair.”

  “In theory. It would seem to be in their best interest to churn out people destined for high paying jobs, since they get a share, but in reality, the less money you make the longer your contract is. It isn’t unusual for a menial laborer to die before they finish their time.”

  “Oh,” he said, understanding dawning on him.

  “And since you’re not free to choose the job or change professions until after your contract is paid, they essentially get an army of slaves.”

  “So why would your parent do it?”

  “Because the award winning scientists and engineers get all the press. They never mention things like the sixty morticians they trained out of my graduating class of a hundred.”

  “And you?”

  “Mortician,” I admitted reluctantly.

  “Really?”

  “There was a shortage that year.”

  “So where does mail order bride figure in?” He asked.

  “Do you know what a mortician does?” I asked. “I hated it so much that I signed on with an agency that agreed to pay off my contract in exchange for my marrying whatever man they found for me. I knew it would be off planet. They always are, but I confess I was a little surprised when it was an illegal colony so small it isn’t even listed on charts.”

  He chuckled. “We aren’t famous out there?”

  I shook my head. “Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t even have an entry, though you do appear in a list in the ‘proscribed worlds’ article.”

  “Proscribed, eh? I like that. Makes us sound very posh.”

  “How did you guys afford me, anyway?” I asked. “I was probably pretty expensive.”

  “We get shipments of medical supplies and humanitarian aid from several different charities. The last few years, Titus has been selling them to black marketeers before they got here. They were probably robbing us blind, it’s not like we know the going rate for antibiotics, but eventually we saved up enough. You see enough babies born with birth defects, nothing seems too expensive.” There was something about the way he said it that I didn’t like. It sounded rehearsed. It was also exactly what I had expected him to say. That meant it was probably another lie.

  This was turning into the worse first date ever, but since the mood was already gone, I figured I might as well kill it for good.

  “So where did Quince and Sebastian go?” I asked.

  He’d clearly forgotten all about promising to tell me.

  Far from being annoyed at me for bringing it up, he actually looked amused.

  “That must have sounded pretty nefarious to you, but he’s just going down to visit his mother. They don’t get along very well, and he always makes a big fuss.”

  I thought over what I’d heard and felt like an idiot. There really wasn’t anything to link Sebastian’s comment about it being risky for Julian to be away with what was going on with Quince. I’d made the assumption based entirely on the fact that nothing ever seemed to happen, so when two things did at the same time, I thought of it as all one big incident. The reality of two small incidents that had nothing to do with each other was less exciting, but a lot more likely.

  We played three rounds of backgammon and drank the rest of the bottle of mead. Bedtime was a lot less awkward than I’d expected. Julian pulled a blanket from the large bag and made himself a bed on the floor, then waited for me to be settled before turning off the light.

  “Crap!” he swore, almost as soon as the darkness settled. He turned the light back on and came over to my bed.

  I tensed up, but he just grinned and pushed my bed, with me in it, over the top of the hatch.

  “Tricky!” He yelled in his Sebastian voice and I giggled.

  “Where does he think you’ll go?” Julian asked, laying back down and turning the light off again. “Titus warned you about going into the city, right?”

  “He said the locals wouldn’t approve of me,” I said, trying to recall his exact words.

  “That would be an understatement,” Julian said, his voice barely above a whisper and very serious indeed. “They blame Earth for everything from power shortages to blisters, and there aren’t enough of us that you wouldn’t be instantly recognized as an outsider. You’d be luck if all they did was lynch you.”

  I tried to think of something worse than a good lynching, and failed.

  “Maybe he thinks you’ll throw yourself to the pollies,” he offered.

  “Pollies?”

  “Those big things we passed on the way here,” he explained. “We call them pollies because they’re polyhedral. Technically, they’re rhombic triacontahedrons, but that doesn’t shorten into anything cute.”

  “Perhaps he’s afraid I’ll steal his crazy boat sled contraption and make a run for it. I don’t suppose you have some nice tropical islands around the equator that nobody has told me about?”

  He scoffed. “This is the equator.”

  I fell asleep with a smile on my face for the first time in ages, but was awakened a few hours later by a half heard noise. I turned on my starlight vision and saw Julian asleep exactly where I’d left him, then turned it off and dialed up my hearing instead. It was a chore to tune, tending to amplify useless things like my own heartbeat or the wind against the windows, but I fooled with it until I finally got it right.

  My keepers had returned. I could hear Sebastian snoring and something else, a low, lonely sound. Quince, I realized. Sobbing.

  Chapter Five

  Changing of the Guards

  The next morning, Julian was up and splashing around in the bathroom early, and I moved the bed over so he could leave, but then promptly went back to sleep. My breakfast was beside the hatch, ice cold and gelatinous when I woke up for the second time. I spruced myself up and poked my head down the hatch.

  Quince was in his bed curled up with his back to the room and Sebastian shot me a warning look.

  “Quince?” I asked hesitantly. Sebastian could grimace all he wanted, but I had grown up in a facility that held one hundred children from each year, zero to eighteen and I knew more than a little about childhood trauma. Wallowing was never the answer.

  I grabbed the little pack Julian had returned to me and desc
ended the ladder. It wasn’t as good as my actual luggage would have been, it was just a few things I’d thrown together at the last minute and put on my belt, but it was more than I’d had before and for this situation at least, it was perfect.

  I crept over to his bed and sat down on the edge beside him, then opened the pack and rummaged through it. The device I chose was no larger than a pencil, smooth and black, with a little ridge of lines down the outside.

  Sebastian came up, standing over me like a sentry, alert in case I was about to do anything that would make things worse. I found his concern oddly touching, even if his looming presence was more than a little disconcerting.

  “Do you like books?” I asked Quince, aware that he couldn’t answer but wanting him to hear my voice just the same. “When I was your age, I read all the time. I heard Sebastian say there was a library here, and I saw him with a book the other day. I’m actually a little jealous. On Earth, almost no one can afford real paper books anymore. But we have these, see?” I held out the little wand.

  Apparently satisfied that I was trying to be helpful, Sebastian retreated to his own bed, but he leaned back with his arms crossed over his chest, watching me.

  “There’s something nice about a big, thick book in your hand. You can feel its weight, and that makes the story feel more real. At least it always did to me. But these are neat too, because they aren’t just one book, they’re hundreds of them, all at once.”

  That made Sebastian take notice.

  “Hundreds?” He asked.

  “Actually, over one hundred and fifty thousand,” I admitted.

  I felt Quince roll his head a little, so he could see, but made a point of not looking at him. I knew his eyes would be red from crying all night, and the last thing an adolescent boy needed was a woman seeing him like that.

  I held the wand firmly in one hand, then took the recessed tab in the center in my other and pulled it open until it was the size of a paperback. I thumped it hard, making the view screen go rigid, and hit the end cap to turn it on.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty,” Sebastian answered for him.

  I looked up at him, startled, then remembered that they probably no longer kept to Earth time here, though most of the colonies did, at least for ages.

  “Wow,” I said genially. “If your twenty here, that makes me… old. Lets not do the math.”

  I could see his grin out of the corner of my eye.

  I tapped the screen three times to get its attention.

  “Boy. Fifteen,” I told it, guessing. “Classic literature.”

  Titles scrolled across the screen.

  “Fantasy,” I added, wanting to take him as far away from his intolerable reality as possible.

  The list shortened and I picked one that I remembered hating as a little girl, not because it was bad, but because it didn’t have any good female characters and I’d felt slighted. Given the supposed reason for Quince’s state, a lack of women seemed like a plus today.

  A title page flashed up.

  “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep or I need my hands free, I have it read to me.”

  “Voice only,” I instructed it. “Use Gregory.”

  A pleasant, male voice with a british accent began:

  “Chapter One. An Unexpected Party.”

  I hit the tab to close the screen but left it on so the audio would continue playing, then sat it on the ground next to the bed, close enough to the wall that it wouldn’t get stepped on.

  I glanced over at Sebastian to see if he approved, only to find him laying on his side, his eyes closed and his head leaned forward so he wouldn’t miss a word. I thought about tip toeing out, but there was nothing waiting for me upstairs except another day of disinterested voyeurism so instead I moved over to one of their extra beds and laid down myself, content to let the story of a simple hobbit on a fabulous journey whisk me away to a better place.

  Quince was up and around the next day, but it was still Sebastian who came with my breakfast. After he’d set it on the table, he pulled my wand from his pocket and placed it carefully beside my tray.

  “It stopped in the middle of the night,” he said, more than a little sadly. “I hope we didn’t run out your battery.”

  It was the friendliest speech I’d had from him.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “It has a kinetic fuel cell,” I explained, then realized that while the technology had been common on Earth for a hundred years or more, he had no idea what it was. “There’s a tiny weight inside,” I said, drastically simplifying, “and as you move the wand around, the weight gets jostled and releases tiny bursts of kinetic energy every time it strikes the wall of it’s housing.” I picked it up and gave it a good shake, then hit the button on the top to resume playback. I shut it back down after the narrator had said a few words, proving my point.

  “It holds enough charge for several days of use, but I ran it down and disconnected the battery before I left the ship because I didn’t want a rough landing to cause an overload.”

  “So it’ll just go on working? Forever?” He asked, a note of awe in his voice.

  I shrugged.

  “Forever is a long time,” I told him. “But the battery will probably outlive the rest of the device. The screens tend to break first.”

  “And it really has thousands of books in it?”

  I pulled out the screen, thumped it, and opened a detail of its contents.

  “Ninety-eight thousand and sixty-one full length novels,” I read off. “Fifteen thousand two-hundred and two short works of fiction, and Seventy-six thousand three hundred and six non-fiction works. It also has movies and some music, but I didn’t bring nearly as many of those since they take up a lot more storage space.”

  “And it has all the words from all of them?” He asked, amazed.

  “Every one,” I assured him, tapping the screen again.

  “The Bible,” I told it mischievously. “King James Version. Genesis. Audio and text. Use Richard.”

  The words scrolled across the screen and a deep, bass voice intoned, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

  Sebastian rolled his eye and I shut it off, slid it closed and handed it to him.

  “In case Quince has trouble getting to sleep again,” I explained.

  “You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” he told me.

  “You should make sure the door is closed if you don’t want to be overheard,” I retorted. “Anyway, it’s silly to see Eve as a troublemaker.”

  “What, it was all the serpents fault?”

  I shrugged.

  “I prefer to think of her as a hero, willing to strive for more while Adam was content to cavort around naked and take what he was given.”

  “There’s something to be said for a little naked cavorting,” he pointed out.

  “In moderation,” I admitted. “But there’s more to life.”

  “If you say so,” he told me, clearly unconvinced.

  Something was nagging at me. I knew that I had seen or heard something that was both obvious and important but only registered it in my subconscious. Now it was sitting there, waiting for me to tickle it free.

  I hopped up on my perch and watched the people outside going about their day while I ran through every conversation I’d had since arriving. Every phrase that had raised my hackles. I started with my nighttime conversation with Sebastian, since I knew for a fact he’d been lying his way through most of it. The mere suggestion of homosexuality had made him go white hot, so I started with that.

  It wasn’t as if I expected to see two men kissing, but a careful eye trained on people who don’t know they’re being observed can discern a great deal. I started in the greenhouses, since there were several of t
hem within easy range of my implants and the clear sides made them easy to see.

  I watched them work for an hour or more. Some joked while others toiled on in silence. Some stayed in groups while others went off alone. I caught not one knowing glance, not one brush of the hand as a tool was passed back and forth, not one clap on the back. Not one. That in itself seemed odd. I seemed to remember that something like six percent was the norm for actively homosexual men on Earth, which really told me nothing anyway. It was taboo here, that much I’d ascertained from Sebastian’s reaction. I went back to watching.

  All the men you can see are bachelors.

  Again I studied them. They ranged in age from children of about five to men who looked fifty, but there was a noticeable gap in the twenties and thirties. I searched out the man I continued to think of as either Duncan or my husband, though neither was true, and watched him because he was an exception. Early to mid thirties, handsome, he worked planting seedlings in a large raised bed for twenty minutes, then moved on to the next one. As he did, I caught what I hadn’t seen before. A slight hitch in his stride, not terribly obvious, but apparently enough to keep him from getting a wife and living in comfort down below. I searched around until I found another subject. He was in his mid-twenties with dark hair and an easy, friendly smile for everyone he passed. He pushed a cart up one of the long rows in the greenhouse beside the dining hall, stopping at every bed and taking a sample of it’s soil, testing it, then making a note in a log book. I could see nothing wrong with him until he reached the end of the row and turned down the next, then I realized he was pushing the cart and doing the tests with just one hand. His right sleeve hung limp and empty at his side.

  Julian told me they had a lot of birth defects. How had I not seen it before? Because I’d been looking at faces mostly, I chided myself, and because aside from the greenhouse workers, nearly everyone I saw was outside, bundled up against the weather and being tossed around by the wind.